


Teeth-Bite Sized

by NightgauntKnits



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, M/M, Narcisistic-personality-disorder, Original Fiction, Self-indulgient-nonsense, Vampires, becoming-a-vampire, changing-to-monster, mentioned-childhood-abuse, narcisistic-parent
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-21
Updated: 2017-10-10
Packaged: 2019-01-03 20:05:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 19,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12153855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightgauntKnits/pseuds/NightgauntKnits
Summary: Joseph "Joe" Kent is a writer trying to live a normal life, or as normal as you can get in his trade, and with his history, as a boy who ran away at 18 to make it as much on his own as possible, so that he could leave behind an emotionally abusive mother and her profound, bizarre belief in vampires. He mostly succeedes, until the morning he wakes up after a night out with his friends with uninvited guests in his apartment, and not in the romantic sense, and things only get darker, and stranger, from there, with his own possible transformation into a creature he thought was a myth.This is SUPPOSED to be for a book I've been working on, off and on, for literally years. It's, kind of a mess, but I love it and it means a lot to me. I'll tweak ratings as necessary.Please let me know if you spot any glaring errors I've missed, or anything else there's a problem with. This is my baby but it includes some sensitive topics close to me, all wrapped up as 'that totally self indulgent bit-lit I've been itching to write'.So. Yeah. Bear with me, and thanks.





	1. Manic Pixie Tooth Fairies

There was someone in my bed with me, and I didn’t remember how they’d got there, let alone whatever conversations might have led up to them getting there the night before. I had a throbbing headache, and a unpleasant taste in my mouth like someone had jammed a penny back behind my teeth, but I also had my sleep pants and an old t-shirt on… So maybe this isn’t what it seems like, which would explain why I don’t remember any god awful drunken flirting.

 

I’m trying to pretend to sleep while I figure this out, and just starting to sort out of the faint background noises are from my hangover or something real, when the slight figure against my back decides to take things into their own hands, and aggressively grabs my jaw, and before I can organize more than a flail of protest, accidentally slamming my knuckles on the wall by the bed in the process, jams a finger in my mouth, prodding around my teeth without regard to the carving knife like damage her fingernails were doing to my gums.

 

“OW! ‘DA FUG?”

 

I bucked, angry and surprised, and pushed off the wall with my food. Since I was closest to it, it launched both of us onto the wooden floor of my apartment with winded cursing and bruised… dignities… for both of us. It also left my invading Tooth Fairy partially pinned under my arm, which I was fine with, since I was reasonably sure my gums were bleeding.

 

“The fuck are you doing?!”

 

“What do you think I was doing?” She snarled in my ear, and out of the corner of my eyes I caught a glimpse of vibrantly pink bangs and angry brown eyes. “Checking your teeth!”

 

“Yeah you fuckin’ lost me right about the time you carved half my gum off with your manicure. WHY? Do I even… who the hell are you?”

 

Before things had taken their left turn into chaos, I’d been trying to figure out a more tactful way to have that discussion, but at this point I was starting to think I’d be lucky if I didn’t end up calling the police while locked in the bathroom or something.

 

“Don’t overreact, Joseph. She’s doing what I asked her to do.”

 

I flinched at the voice, as though I was shy of eighteen again, waiting for a blow to land.

 

“What the fuck are you doing here? You shouldn’t even…”

 

She shouldn’t even have this address. Where the hell had she gotten it? I was going to kill someone. Then move.

 

“Looking in on my ungrateful child apparently.” My mother turned her dark gray eyes on her French manicure, snorted with disgust at some flaw that was almost certainly not her nails and added. “Heaven forbid I make sure my only child hasn’t gotten himself corrupted by some demonic blood drinking hell spawn. Let the poor girl up before she breaks your arms. And clean up your language. I raised you better than that.”

 

“...Are you k…” I start, then glance over my shoulder awkwardly at the delicate pink haired pixie pinned under my arm and elbow, and the expression on her face is enough to convince me not to find out if the promise to break my arms were an exaggeration, but there was one point I wasn’t going to budge on. I was not getting sucked into the crazy, even as I shifted my weight to let my more colorful uninvited guest up. “Vampires. Are not. Fucking. Real.”

 

I’d cut her out of my life the second I’d turned eighteen, but she still made me uncomfortable enough that arguing back to her carried the thrill of poking a lion with a stick and not losing a limb, but it was also fueled by memories not only of my own suffering trying to measure up to her impossible yardstick, but of an ugly divorce from my father. He’d done his best by me, but he had never been as skilled as she was at pulling strings, and he’d lost custody, and then lost his life in a car accident. The only relic I’d managed to save of him, even pictures, had been his wool coat. The rest she’d thrown away, piece by piece, though if you’d heard her tell it, they’d never existed. The way my music collections she didn’t like had never actually been in the house, or my favorite band tshirt had been in my head, never mind that the new car wash rags had some very familiar lettering on them.

 

Pinkie made an incredulous sound as she got to her feet, stepping away from me to stand near my mother. As it turned out, I was the only party dressed for sleeping. My mother, predictably, was wearing a sharp cut business casual pant suit with sensible low heels and a lacy top underneath. Her hair, which used to be the same ashy brown as mine, was mostly gray now, and made her look more like a shark in a lacy cami than I remembered. Pinkie’s own wardrobe seemed to be designed to make her hair look as bright as possible, a slightly fitted black babydoll tshirt that was just cute enough to distract, however briefly, from the tightly corded muscles in her slender arms, and what my fashion backward brain assumed were some kind of yoga pant. Linen and slightly belled, in dark charcoal gray. She was in stocking feet, with mismatched colorful socks, and where my mother’s nails were traditional and slightly stepford wife material, Pinkie’s were neon green. They didn’t, in my brief examination, look like they should be able to cohabit the same space, as though instead they should repel each other like trying to jam matching sides of a magnet together, but apparently no. Not only did Pinkie know my mother and go around checking people’s mouth’s on her command, she’d apparently bought into my mother’s conviction that the world needed monsters besides the human ones we were so damn good at making.

 

Part of me was curious how they’d ended up in the same orbit, but the rest of me, the part with the headache, the bleeding gum line, and two people in my apartment I increasingly wanted to see dragged out in handcuffs, just wanted them to get the fuck out so I could take an advil and nurse some coffee and regret.

 

“OK you know? I’m… I’m not getting into this with you.” I concluded, bolstering my conviction with anger. My anxiety would have been one thing when I was eighteen and desperately afraid she would find a way to get ‘ownership’ of me again, but I was thirty now. What was she going to do? Hand me a bill for the mailbox I’d backed over in my panicked escape in a shitty car I’d blown most of my savings on? “I need you two to leave. Now.”

 

It was tempting to launch into a list of reasons why I didn’t need to hear anything about their fictional supernatural underground, but I bit it back. Doing so would have invited discussion, and discussion gave her an excuse to stay. I didn’t want them to stay. I didn’t even want to find out if one of them had a set of keys, because I was absolutely planning on getting the locks changed… fast.

 

Anyway my head still hurt, and every word, from them or me, felt like someone turning up the pressure a notch, and the word “Vampire” felt more like five notches.

 

Pinkie glanced at my mother, her expression mixed and hard to read, her arms folded as she prepared to be stubborn, but whatever she was looking for in my Mother, it didn’t seem to be what she got. My mother had an audience, and she was going to play to it. Her expression was Shakespearean levels of the wounded innocent, but her eyes were all rage.

 

“This is the thanks I get. You flee in the night from my home like a criminal, you don’t speak to me for years… after all the effort I put in to try and shape you into a decent human being and keep you safe. I finally hear about you and it’s that you’re entangled with… with creatures and leaving your friends terrified for your well being.”

 

I spend much of this speech with my own theatrical posturing, a raised eyebrow and a finger pointed in the correct direction to the front door… but as soon as she gets to the word friends… well… Hold the damn phone. My friends have never met her. I know Susan would never betray me… she has her own family issues. She understands that sometimes there’s no Hollywood happy ending where everyone makes up. This left me at either ‘lying’ or ‘Bill’, out of the only two people I know well enough to go make a fool out of myself with. I can’t deal with this right now though. I just can’t.

 

“I said out. You broke in, you and your buddy goddamn assaulted me to check for whatever supernatural STD you’ve made up this week, I’m fine, I’m angry, I’m hung over, and I want you to leave. There is no discussion. Get. OUT.”

 

I take a step toward them, making a sweeping gesture with one arm like I’m shooing cats, praying that Pinkie doesn’t decide to make good on my mother's comment about breaking arms. Even though they’re technically on the wrong side of breaking and entering, it’s damn hard to picture charges of any kind sticking. Not to my mother and her current golden child. I feel almost ridiculously blessed when they actually comply, my mother turning sharply on her heel as though the entire retreat was her idea and marching sharply back down the short hallway, making a sharp gesture with her hand and calling her companion.

 

“Candice. Time to go.”

 

“You’re no... “ Pinkie… whose actual name is Candice apparently, though she curls her lip as though she’d rather not be addressed by that name. Candice shoots me another look over her shoulder, that same mixed expression, and starts after my mother, adding, more quietly. “Yeah whatever. Bullshit soap opera…”

 

I stood my ground until I heard the front door slam, and then checked the path they’d taken to make sure neither of them had stashed themselves somewhere to ambush me when I set up a pot of coffee, but mercifully, they were actually gone. I felt as though I should have felt relieved, but instead it was more like having a skull full of bees. How did she get in? How did I get rid of her? How did woman I could probably have tucked under my arm and moved in a pinch still make me feel like I should crawl to her weeping for forgiveness for the sins she saw in me? For that matter, what could have possibly happened that would make any of my friends think it was a good idea to contact her, assuming she was telling the truth about that.

 

There were a hundred things I could think of that needed to be done, now that they were gone. Call Bill and Susan and find out what they knew, and how my Mother had showed up on the doorstep she wasn’t supposed to be able to find. Make coffee, have a shower. Any of those things.

 

Instead I pulled up a chair, sat down heavily and put my head on my arms, and muffled my own frustrated scream with my crossed arms. It didn’t help my headache at all.

 

\---- 

I dropped the coffee when the phone rang.

 

Some Tylenol had pushed the headache back to background noise, but it hadn’t smoked out the ‘head-full of bees’ sensation, and they became no quieter when coffee grounds made a near black firework on the linoleum, and stuck to my shower-damp feet, making everything smell faintly like Brazilian Rain forest Nut with a faint after tone of ‘Ocean Mist’ scented body wash. It wasn’t the most appealing combination.

The phone gave another electronic bleat as I sighed in exasperation, spreading my hands at the mess on the floor as though it might actually reconsider its life choices and put itself back in the bag, and when it failed to do so, and took a long step to try and get past most of the spill and reached for the phone, narrowing my eyes at the caller ID.

Half of me expected it to be my mother, and I wasn’t sure what I would have done then. Pick up? Let the machine get it? Pick it up long enough to bang the phone on the table until she hung up?

Fortunately it wasn’t a question I had to answer now, since it was someone else that I did actually want to talk to. ‘Susan Quinn’ read the display,” I sighed out a ‘Thank God’, on a breath I didn’t realize I had been holding, and grabbed the phone off the charger.

“Susan! Hey!”

The greeting came out a little breathless, and I leaned against the wall trying to scrape coffee grounds off the top of my foot with my jeans, and repeated, trying to sound more stable and less as though I had sprinted through the apartment. “Hey. What’s up? I was thinking about calling you guys.”

“Oh good, you’re up.” Susan drawled from her end of the receiver. I could almost picture the ghost of a smile. “I kind of figured I’d get the machine. Or some kind of Dawn of the Dead sound effect before you knocked the phone on the floor trying to hang it up.”

“Ha. No… but if you’d called earlier maybe.” I glanced down at my feet, and tried to get some more of the coffee grounds off. Too bad I didn’t tend to go in for exfoliant stuff, it felt like ground coffee might make a decent one. Market it with all the other unnecessarily caffeinated products on the market these days.  
“Oh really?” I heard the faint breathy pause as she took a sip of something on the other end, probably one of her partners smoothies, since the sip was followed by a faint sound that could have been a grimace, and a mutter of “Needs more strawberry” and then, as she turned her attention back to the phone. “Were you just hung over or would I have been interrupting something? Did that gorgeous drink of water you were talking to come over for dinner?” She paused and added, conspiratorially. “...Breakfast?”  
“I…” I blinked as the headache rolled back over me in a wave, clearing out anxiety and everything else in a thick gluey tide from which it was difficult to retrieve anything. “Wait what gorgeous drink of water?” Not one with vibrantly pink hair, I hoped. On her own she’d be nice enough, but her ties to my mother made me want to get back in the shower with an steel wool pad.

“Wow, I’m going to have to find out what was in that drink she got you. It must have been a doozie to forget her. Really gorgeous, couple inches taller than you. Really damn pretty, like… Lupita pretty, but kind of pretty the way a tiger is pretty.”

Definitely not Candice then. I shut my eyes and leaned against the wall by the phone, massaging my temple, trying to get the headache to retreat. Stress. Had to be stress. It was a fairly shitty ass morning. I could almost see the woman she was describing, gorgeous in a way that made you feel like you might be in danger, and that you might be ok with that. Dark brown eyes with a touch of amber. I could picture her smile, the color of her lipstick, something dark and plum and gorgeous… but that was all I could pull back up.

“Yeah I guess it must have been. No, no she didn’t come over.” I was pretty sure anyway. “My mother did.” I added, pointedly, and the returned headache added an extra bit of sharpness to it. “She brought a friend too. It was really… uh…” I fought for a word that would summarize it. nightmarish came to mind. I settled on “Nostalgic.”

“Oh fuck seriously? Where the fuck did she come from? I thought she didn’t know where you were living?”  
“She implied one of my ‘friends’ called her. I don’t know if she’s bluffing or if somehow she got her claws into Bill. She could have dug something up on-line… narrowed it down from a book jacket or something.”

“...If Bill called that she hag I will help you flog sense into him.” She snarled, and I heard the background bang as she set her drink down too hard.

“It might not have been him.” I admitted, though there was part of me that wanted to hang it around his neck. It would give me a villain to blame that felt slightly less untouchable than she did. “She’s pretty good at fabricating stuff to get what she wants.”  
“True.” She sounded nearly as resigned as I felt, predatory responses thwarted by the potential of a false trail. “Are you ok? You sound like hell.”

“Mm. Yeah I think so. I just… I’ve got one monster of a headache. I thought I was beating it, but it’s back.”

“Damn… time to break out your best hangover cures. You put your feet up for a bit, I’ll shake down Bill and maybe call you back later. Sound good?”  
“Sounds fantastic.”  
I should call Bill myself. I should take charge and handle the investigation parts, but my head still pounded and once it was gone, I didn’t doubt the anxiety ‘bee swarm’ would be back. Besides I knew Susan, and usually Bill, had my back. We were all human, we screwed up sometimes, but they were as close as I’d felt to having family since my father died. I knew I could let her handle this, and maybe do it better than I would until I could unruffle my own feathers. She could be objective when I’d, for the moment, be more likely to react at knee-jerk, jumping at shadows.

“I really appreciate it Suse. Thanks.” I sighed into the phone, happy to have her take that weight off my shoulders. “I’m going to see about getting this headache under control then put in a request to get the locks changed.”  
“You do that. I’ll tell Alex you said hi.” She promised, referring to her partner.  
“And to add more strawberries to the health shake?” I teased, wearily.  
She laughed. “That too.”

 

\------------

 

I cashed in on a mental health day, went back to bed, and didn’t crawl out of it so much as ooze out, still groggy and not entirely sure what time it was. The headache was gone, but now I was just feeling the effects of oversleeping… and not eating breakfast, and potentially not lunch either. I wasn’t sure I wanted to look at the clock to find out.

 

“Well that worked well.” I muttered sarcastically, rubbing my face with both hands, grimacing at the unshaved stubble. Some guys can pull off the rugged outdoors-man thing with their face, but every time I’ve ever considered it, I’ve just felt like a pretentious hedgehog. At the moment a starving one as well. “OK let’s try this whole thing again.”

 

I couldn’t quite shake off the last shreds of whatever I’d been dreaming. Something about the woman Susan had been describing, though I wasn’t sure if this was because I actually remembered her on some level or if it was just because Sue had been kind enough to describe her for me. I remembered a handful of details anyway, a brilliant smile, not the kind you’d use to advertise perfect dental alignment, but not unattractive, made to seem whiter by dark skin and plum colored lipstick. The lipstick in particular had stuck with me for some reason. It was somehow decadent, even as a foggy memory, a soft matte curve like a perfect piece of fruit.

I remembered feeling very heavy, somewhere between drunk and ‘something is really wrong’ levels of being sick, almost too heavy to move, but I couldn’t remember which one it was. Probably drunk. Or at least I didn’t care to consider the alternatives. I didn’t think I’d been robbed…

_“Oh we’ll have fun tonight then… you’ll love this.”_

I shuffled toward the kitchen with a frown, trying to shake out any more details, but I couldn’t retrieve anything else. Sharper details felt like they were slipping through my fingers, back out of reach the way dreams do. The harder I tried to hold on to anything the faster everything else seemed to slip away, except for those words, which made the hair on the back of my neck prickle.  
“Note to self, no more drinks from strangers. Next time I might wake up in a goddamn Hitchcock film.” I muttered. I should check for my wallet and phone. I at least knew where my car was, it was in Sue’s shop, waiting on parts, and another lecture or three on giving it up as a lost cause. She wasn’t wrong… I just really… really hated car shopping, even with Sue’s help.

_We’ll have fun tonight_

 

Too damn bad I had no idea what the hell that was supposed to mean, or if it had actually happened.

 

Stupid crazy dreams, today was already parked firmly in surreal territory without that bit of help.

 

I wondered how Suzie was making out. Better than I was so far I imagined, or at least less tedious, as I pawed my way through the fridge for leftovers, finally brewed a pot of coffee, and put myself through the paces of putting in a request to change the locks, in which I got to have a lengthy conversation with my curious landlord why no, I wasn’t just going to make up with my Mother, no I would not send her flowers like a good son, thank you very much, and could he just pretend that her title had ‘in law’ attached if it helped him to compare it to certain people in his life that made him cringe.

 

Being pissed at my landlord did at least help clear out some of the cobwebs, at least as much as the coffee, and put some spark behind me turning over my apartment to make sure I hadn’t had anything come up ‘misplaced’. When I finally sat down and tossed the last rummaged receipt back into the waste bin though, the only thing I seemed to have misplaced were my memories of the tail end of last night.

 

I remembered Susan and Bill coming over just fine, We’d taken Bill’s car, not because he didn’t want to be drinking, but just because it was his night to be the driver, (and alternate between complaining and daring us to order the most embarrassingly named drinks he could find in his iPhone app). I remembered getting to the bar, and playing dead when Susan asked me for about the five hundredth time when I was going to retire my shitty old Volvo. Then we’d ordered food, a pitcher of beer and… And sometime after that things sort of… weren’t there. No, not entirely not there… I could sort of remember getting up to do something, put some quarters in the juke box I think, certainly not to order the pornographically named drink Bill was trying to push on us, and then… after that I lost the threads. And that bothered me. We’d been… maybe on our second pitcher of beer, not even hard alcohol and while we wouldn’t have been fit to drive… it wasn’t the point where I should have been having to even think about losing memories. We’d never done that, ever.

 

I could see the woman from my dream smiling at me with more clarity than I could even see whatever my next action had been. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. I’d have thought that if whatever drink I’d apparently been handed had hit me with that kind of dump truck force, I would have lost memories after that point, but maybe that was just flawed logic talking. Arguably the only downside to not having familiarity with how ‘blackout drunk’ worked was ‘not knowing how black out drunk worked’.

 

I couldn’t even remember how I’d gotten home, so I had to assume it was the mystery lady. My mother would have made a much bigger deal if she’d been the one to get me home. It just wasn’t her style to to let something go when she could remind you how much she had suffered to come to your aid. It just didn’t happen, in my experience, though she might be more circumspect about it depending on the company. Nothing I’d seen in our surprised reunion indicated she had let that go since I was a teenager.

 

“Leopard… spots.” I sighed, raking my fingers through my hair, and reached for the phone to check on Susan. She did say she’d call, but I wasn’t sure I could take waiting here any longer.

 

\---

 

I had always felt comfortable in my apartment, at least until this morning, but now that I’d caught up on sleep, I just wanted to be someplace else; Anyplace else. Hell I was pretty sure that if I could have unzipped my own skin and been someone else for a while I’d have done so in a heartbeat.  
I paced around for what the clock told me was maybe two minutes, but it felt like longer, and picked up the phone and left Susan a message, telling her to call me at my Cell-phone if she had anything to tell me, because I was going to grab my computer and get out for a while.  
Normally I didn’t go for the ‘go out and write’ thing, or at least I hadn’t for years since I had lost an laptop to a spilled drink and good intentions, and hadn’t had the chance to backup my stuff. These days I took more precautions, even if it was just using something like an information cloud and a USB stick for backup, but I’d just never gotten back into it. Today I was up for breaking my own patterns, not because I thought it would get rid of the ugly feeling of having had my safe spaces invaded, or the equal anxiety that came with not being as sure as I would like what had happened the previous night, it just felt safer to be surrounded by other people.  
I was angry again by the time I left the apartment and locked the door, but it wasn’t even a rational sort of anger. I was mad at myself, angry at being complacent, for thinking I was safe. I was angry that I’d gotten tangled up in something I couldn’t remember, it made me feel like an idiot. I felt as though I’d been roped into some kind of giant joke to point out the gaping flaws in my ability to be a responsible, self-reliant adult.  
“We’re going to have fun, tonight.”  
Someone sure as hell had, but I wasn’t sure it was me; God and the damn vampire thing. I did not need that, especially not with the creepy semi dreams. Even knowing it was fictional, it was a little easier than I cared to admit to mentally add on some pointy white fangs to my half memory of the lady in the back of the car. I didn’t have any bite marks that I’d seen, though if I turned out to have been picked up by a vampire enthusiast in expensive tooth caps…  
It would be a hilariously, near mundane trigger for all the chaos it had set off. No, not even hilarious, it was too painful to be funny, and I caught myself shooting a wary glare at people passing me on the street, holding my bag more tightly than maybe I needed to. That was the effect she had on me, distrust. One reappearance in my life and suddenly I was jumping at shadows. It was like having a fire drill in your brain, there wasn’t really a fire but you felt like there was, or should be. I hated it.

 

It felt like you should be able to chase it out of your head if you just stopped on the street corner and screamed and swore until the street cleared, but… Well leave it that I knew that no matter how much I vented, I’d feel better when I felt better. However long that took.

It also meant that, in spite of the change of scenery, the small crowd inside the coffee shop was a mixed comfort at best, and I could imagine their eyes drilling just the same as the people outside, as if they knew everything I’d gotten into and were judging me for it.

 

 

I thought back, angrily to the imagined chorus of judgment, setting my jaw as I approached the counter, and felt guilty about it when the barrista, an androgynous soul with a mild acne problem, turned a touch paler and gripped the counter by the register in defense against what he was certain was going to be ‘One of those Angry Customers looking for a fight’.

It made me feel guilty, and I forced my expression into a more relaxed one. It wasn’t their fault. Poor soul didn’t get paid enough to put up with my need to spend some time with a therapist.

I ordered a caramel latte and a slice of pumpkin bread, because as an fully grown adult, I am entitled to choose to eat and drink things with enough added sugar to make a toddler warp out of phase with reality. It was comfort food, something I could hide behind for a while, like the laptop screen.

 

I gave the cashier my best smile, hoped it conveyed a sense of ‘sorry not trying to terrorize you’, and fumbled a tip into the Jar while he rung me out. I wasn’t sure he even noticed while fighting with the apparently opinionated machine, but I figured I probably owed it to him for thundering through looking like I was going to breathe fire on the biscotti.

 

It wasn’t their fault; my mother was at fault.

 

My doubts helpfully provided, as I collected my drink and pumpkin bread, and made a quick slide into a small table when it vacated. I would have preferred one of the ones in the back, so I could put my back to a wall and relax, but apparently everyone else preferred the same thing.

 

No big deal. I could handle this. I’d just look exactly like every other pretentious bugger settling himself into the nearest seat and propping his laptop in front of him. One of the differences between me and the fabricated villainous hipster in my head was that I really didn’t actually want people browsing over my shoulder, and I sort of imagined him as the type who would. Maybe I could use him in one of my stories at some point down the road. He seemed like a delightfully unpleasant sort. People would love to hate him. Or maybe I was just picturing him in relation to the manic pixie Karate Kid who’d assaulted me this morning.

 

Christ on a Cracker.

 

I distracted myself setting up the laptop, fully planning to actually write something. I even got as far as opening my current project… and then innocently decided to maybe just… browse around and look up the symptoms of being drunk enough to lose memories.

 

It was an innocent enough thought. It was also a rabbit hole, and ‘suddenly’ I was taking a sip of coffee that had, somewhere along the line, sunk to just a hair above room temperature, and had only eaten about half of my pumpkin bread. The phone at my elbow hadn’t buzzed once, so nothing from Susan, just me and a list of things that just… weren’t really matching up to last night. I hadn’t drunk that much last night, at least not in the span up to the mystery beverage. I wasn’t sure could have been put in one glass that could have knocked me that hard on my ass… not without a little help, and I…  
I was reluctant to look up the symptoms of drugging someone, as if not looking it up made it stop being an option on the table.

 

What were my other options though, logically? Blackout meant… blackout. Not… half memories or… what I thought were memories. I really really thought it was a memory at that point, not a dream.

 

“Ugh, I’ll spare you the pain, don’t google anything about symptoms of vampire bites, you’ll get pages of really painful dreck and a lot more pages of people with a lot of dyed corn syrup poured all over them.”

 

“I w….” I started to protest by reflex, jumping in my seat and almost knocking both the phone and the remaining pumpkin bread on the floor. The plate, and the bread, save for a few crumbs, didn’t make it all the way to the tipping point though before a fast, slender hand reached over me and pinned it down with a sharp ceramic ‘clack’. Familiar bright green fingernail polish serving as exclamation points to the sound.

 

Oh hell no. Hell fucking no.

 

“Helen doesn’t know I’m here.” Candice’s voice was level, and business flat. “...Can we talk?”

 

-

 

My first instinct was to overturn the table and yell No loudly, and storm out without regard to my laptop or anything else, so it was perhaps fortunate that instead I just… locked up, staring at her in fury and confusion as I awkwardly rescued the plate and moved it away from the edge of the table.

 

Not that I gave a damn at this point if it fell, somehow I wasn’t remotely interested anymore, wasn’t sure I was ever going to enjoy it again.

 

A catalog of different responses banged around in my head, but most of them died silently, a few of them making it as far as a distressed and strangled sound that wasn’t quite a word.

 

She watched me flounder, sitting down smoothly in the seat across from me as I angrily rearranged things in front of me, shutting my laptop maybe more forcefully than I should have. The headache that had retreated earlier crept back on a war march to the angry sound of my own pulse, and I knew my own expression was just getting angrier while hers remained placid and patient.

 

“Y…” I started, choked on it again, and forced the words out anyway, strained in an attempt to speak quietly, or at least at normal tones, instead of drawing attention. “What the hell do you want?”

 

“Conversation?” She offered back, putting her chin on her hand and flashing a tight smile. Her expression suggested she was teasing, but her eyes didn’t...the way she sat was the same, the pose said relaxed, but closer up, it was considerably more obvious that she had deliberately posed, that she was tense as hell. “....Seriously we need to talk.”

 

“About what? Breaking and entering charges?” I growled through my teeth. It might not be the best idea, but damnit, I was mad. She didn’t look even remotely phased. Maybe she’d heard that one before? Then again… probably.

 

“How’s the headache?”

 

“What?” I hadn’t touched my head, though I almost did reflexively as she asked I didn’t think I’d done anything to indicate I had one… Was it that obvious? What did it even have to do with anything?

 

“Headache, right? That part sucks.”

 

“...Yeah… hangovers do that…” I continued to frown at her, though it was quickly becoming more one of confusion than just anger. She seemed to be driving at something, and I didn’t think it was hangovers. I said a silent prayer she wasn’t about to start on something about…

 

“Yeah no. I don’t think you’re hung-over.”

 

And then I remembered why I didn’t make a habit of praying to things. If there was a god, or gods, they seemed to have a sort of perverse sense of humor about that sort of thing.

 

I leaned back in my chair and gave her a disgusted look.  
“AND we’re done. Thanks. Bye. Do not collect go, do not collect two hundred dollars, please take a note that vampire novels all belong in the fiction section.”

 

“I’m trying to help you out.” She finally stopped looking placid and superior and glared back at me as I fumbled for my backpack to start putting the laptop away. Time to find a new spot to kill time.

 

“Yeah well, I don’t need that kind of help. You on the other hand…”

 

She stood up and took a step toward me, putting a palm on my laptop to stay me from putting it away. She had to look up to look into my eyes, but it didn’t stop her from giving off an impressive presence. She was just one of those types, even with the ridiculously pink hair. Maybe I was just biased against pink. Or against people who looked like they should be pined after by my Fictional-Hipster-Villain.

 

“I’m trying. To help you out. This isn’t going to go away, Kent. It’s going to get weirder, and it’s going to get dangerous, and you won’t have a clue what to do about it.”

 

“... Well for starters I tell you both to leave me alone… I don’t like being threatened. Or followed.” I reached to tug the laptop from under her hand, and she slid it backward, stubbornly, in spite of the gazes it drew.

 

“I’m not threatening you, I’m telling you. I’m sorry your bitch mother scared you off from this. I’m sorry you don’t know things because she doesn’t know how to be a parent. But you’re in a lot deeper than you think you are, and that’s not my fault. Or yours.”

 

“Let go of my computer.”

 

I tugged the corner gently, I didn’t want this to be a scene. No I did… but… hell I wanted to hit her. I didn’t normally want to hit people, but I just … kind of wanted to see red right now. I needed to get the fuck out of here.

 

“She didn’t slip you a roofie last night, Kent. Or a strong shot.” She lifted her hand fractionally, and let the laptop slide into my grip. I put it away roughly, pinched myself zipping the bag too aggressively.

 

“ Ow. Damnit. You’re…. you’re…. just…” Crazy? Delusional? Completely pulling my leg? I didn’t know the right word I wanted, so I snorted instead. Eloquent, seriously. I started for the (damp. Thank god for waterproof cases) cell phone next, snatching it up from where the long suffering barista was trying to clean up the mess with a pained expression, but she got there first, swiping her finger across the unlock screen. It didn’t have a code to punch in, I’d gotten tired in a week of unlocking it, and had undone the option. Clearly time to put security over convenience. “Hey!”

 

“I’m putting my number in your phone.” She growled.

 

“Great, you do that.” Anything I could take to the police, I guessed. How could anyone take this stuff so seriously? She handed it back to me with a raised eyebrow, and I grabbed it and pocketed it, ignoring the sticky mess it was going to make of the inside of my pocket. Sugar would wash. People were definitely looking now, out of the corner of their eyes, trying to figure out what we were arguing about and if it was worth their time and interest. At least one of them was updating facebook on their phone. Nice to know we’d drawn enough attention to be worthy of someone’s status update, if nothing else. I wondered if they thought it was a breakup, or if they’d actually caught the part about vampires. Maybe they thought we were advertising something.

 

“When you pull your head out of your ass and want to know what’s happening… call me.” She finally moved out of my personal bubble, heaving a sigh and looking… not to the door but to the menu board. It actually looked like she was going to stick around and order something, apparently the attention from the bystanders didn’t bug her like it was me. “Or you could hang out and find out who gets to you first. Lily or your mother. That’s cool too.” She added, and that sounded much more like a threat.

 

“Who the hell is Lily?” I couldn’t help it. The question just jumped out, even while I was putting my backpack on my shoulder.

 

“The Vampire.” Candice answered back, coldly, and looked back at me one more time. “The one who gave you her blood.”

 

\---------------

 

I left her stepping into line with a thoughtful expression as she examined the pastry case, left my abandoned plate on the table like a jerk. I just… left. The headache was still doing a warmarch, bang bang to my heartbeat, and my fast angry walk didn’t help.

 

I should call the police. No… I shouldn’t. No one would believe any of this. I wasn’t Mr. Universe but I wasn’t a small man either, if I wasn’t afraid she’d break my nose I had the flat out mass to pick up Candice and move her around with one arm. Who’d believe I saw her as a threat? I barely believed I saw her as a threat. People struggled to understand that my mother was dangerous, I’d be laughed out of the room. It wasn’t like she’d brandished a gun or a knife at me. She’d just… invaded my home and talked about vampires. Then showed up in a public coffee shop and talked about vampires more. The most dangerous thing she’d actually done was stick her finger in my mouth and poke my teeth.

 

I glanced back over my shoulder, just to see if I saw a glimpse of my mother, or some bright pink hair, but saw nothing, and slowed down long enough to look around. I was still in a mostly culinary area, fewer coffee shops or tea houses, more restaurants.  
I thought about more coffee, but wasn’t sure it would make any difference, and I didn’t have anything with me that I could take. Maybe I should hit a pharmacy, get one of those little travel packets or something.

 

I wasn’t sure where to go next. The park maybe? But I wouldn’t be able to mooch a plug to charge up with. My laptop could run out of battery on me, and then I’d just be sitting around being extra bored. Someplace else probably had free wi-fi, but I was too distracted to think of the less obvious locations. Fast food joint maybe, but there wasn’t one on this strip…

 

I picked at the strap of the backpack and glanced over the flap of skin on my hand that I’d pinched in the zipper as I thought, trying to get myself together. I’d torn skin slightly, barely worse than a papercut but just enough to draw a tiny patch of blood that was already trying to scab up.

 

The vampire who gave you her blood.

 

Ugh. UGH.

 

People milled pasty me oblivious or just unconcerned, discussing where they were going and what they were going to eat, while my head felt like it was going to split open, like when Zeus had someone knock his head open with a hammer and Athena jumped out. The closest there was to a goddess in my head though was the woman from my dream about the car, smiling flirtatiously and pushing a glass into my hand. It was as dark as cranberry juice, and cold. It absolutely killed me that I still couldn’t tell if it was an actual memory, or if I was just fabricating it based on what I’d been told.

 

It wasn’t real. Vampires didn’t exist. It was just… just… it was getting to me.

 

My cell phone vibrated in my pocket, and started playing ‘Shut up and Drive’, and I almost jumped out of my skin before I realized what was going on, and clawed it out of my pocket. Susan’s ring-tone. GOOD. Good; I wanted to talk to Susan. I needed to be able to talk to someone sane and grounded. Someone who wouldn’t feed more images of vampires into my head.

 

“Sue!” I greeted her, breathlessly. “Hey! Please tell me you know something.”

 

“...Well… Sort of.”

 

She sounded frustrated and reluctant all at once, which didn’t bode too well.

 

“Goddamnit, Bill gave them my address didn’t he?”

 

“He did.” She heaved a huge sigh. “I already yelled at him and he feels really bad. She had him sold on some line about wanting to reconcile over past mistakes. I pointed out that the only mistakes she believes in are yours. But you’re gonna want to push to get the locks changed. He loaned her the spare from house sitting so she might have gotten a copy made.”

 

“Ughhh.” I groaned into the phone. This was an option I’d been afraid of, and why I’d put in a request, but I wasn’t sure how long it would take to get done. I knew it would get done eventually, but eventually wasn’t when I wanted it done. “That’s.. goddamnit Bill.”

 

“Yeah.” Susan sounded sympathetic, but there wasn’t much either of us could do about it right now. “What are you going to do?”

 

“I...um.” I hadn’t thought about it. I’d sort of figured I had slightly more time in which to argue with my landlord about changing the locks, but this felt considerably more imperative. “...I think I’ll see about getting a hotel room tonight.” I admitted. “I don’t want to wake up with her in my kitchen or something.”

 

The conversation with Candice jangled in my head, and I opened my mouth to tell her about it, then stopped myself. She didn’t need to know what the Bonkers-Brigade was claiming was in my drink, or at least… I didn’t want her to worry about it. What if it was blood? Well… not vampire blood, but what if there had been blood in it? In this day and age that made an damn good boogieman on its own.

 

I was worried about it enough, and that in and of itself was pretty bonkers. She seemed so damn sincere; but I knew my mother could do. Believing the bullshit didn’t make the bullshit be true. She must have heard my intake of breath or something though, because Susan almost immediately asked another question.

 

“How are you doing? Any more trouble? You… honestly don’t sound too much better.”

 

“Er, yeah.” I lied, awkwardly. “I just… the headache came back.”

 

I didn’t think I was a terribly good liar, and the thoughtful noise she made over the phone made me doubt she believed me. In fact I was sure she didn’t, but she didn’t push any further either, though I knew she was tucking it behind her ear for later, so to speak.

 

“Do you need any help or anything? You can’t just wander around all day. I think it’s supposed to rain later. The shop is closed today, do you need me to come by and get you or something?”

 

It was tempting. God it was temping. Susan and her Partner were fantastic. They’d bend over backward for you if you needed it… But they also didn’t get many breaks. I didn’t want to take over their time together because I was having trouble with my mom. Even if it sounded like safety and home.

 

“N...no.” I drew out the word without thinking about it, giving away the temptation as I reluctantly gave her a negative. “No I’m… I’m fine. I’ll go look into that hotel thing. I can pick up a couple items from my house and lock up. It won’t stop her from getting in if she has a key, but it’ll make me feel better.

 

I wasn’t convinced still she wouldn’t get in without a key, but at least the image of my mother trying to scale a fire escape in her suit from this morning provided a momentary chuckle… one that made the headache attempt to stab me in the nerve endings. “I’ve got chargers with me so I won’t drop off the planet, I promise.”

 

“Well…” She sounded unsure herself, and something clinked in the background. Maybe the pen cup by the phone. It sounded like she might be fussing with the pens, checking them for ink so she could toy with one. “...If you’re sure. But if you want someone to go with you that’s cool too, ok? I can come right over.”

 

“I appreciate it. I really do.”

 

And it was true. It was nice to have that lifeline to people I knew wouldn’t judge, even if it was going to take some calming down before I talked to Bill again.

 

“Thanks for talking to Bill, by the way.”

 

“No problem, but I hope you talk to him later, he feels terrible, and you know that takes a lot.”

 

“I’ll check in with him after I book a room, I promise.”

 

Damn, what the hell was wrong with me today anyway? The headache felt like it was trying to break new ground, spreading down my vertebrae and making my neck and shoulders begin to ache. Maybe it wasn’t just a hangover? Maybe I was coming down with something. Be just my luck if I was getting the flu or something. I’d had my flu shot, but that wasn’t a guarantee.

 

“I gotta go…” I wanted to sit down more than continue the conversation, but not here.

 

“O..ok…” I could hear the doubt in her voice, and I knew i should say something pleasant or reassuring, but instead I sort of muttered a goodbye and hung up.

 

“Damnit, pull it together.” I chastised myself, as though I could honestly change how I felt just by being annoyed with myself. “Go back, get some stuff, get someplace to stay. Maybe some takeout.” Maybe some water or a sports drink or something. Maybe that would help.

 

I just had to get home and throw a couple things in a bag, maybe make a call and go. Call from my cellphone, just in case. That wasn’t so hard…

 

\----------

 

I found out that I was wrong to assume I’d be alone when I got back to my apartment building, and spotted Bill, leaning against my door frame, chatting with my neighbor Ms. Diddle. She was slightly hard of hearing, which is why Bill had gotten away for so long in calling her Ms. Piddle after her dog, a surreal cross between an ambitious dachshund and an Italian greyhound appropriately named Dali, had peed on his shoes.

 

She was a fun neighbor to have, a tiny woman at five foot even, with crisply short pale silver hair and amber brown eyes. She was also an active protester for equal rights even in her seventies, and this was demonstrated as she gestured emphatically in her conversation and the first words of it I caught were an a loud “Fuck the pigs!” followed by an excited bird like giggle, like a child who had just heard a dirty joke.

 

Bill looked sort of anxious and trapped, like he was waiting for a squad of cops in riot gear to bust through the wall and beat them both black and blue, and he was only marginally saved when Ms. Diddle’s hawk like eyes spotted me getting off the elevator. She reached up and slapped Bill on the arm hard enough that I saw him mouth a silent ‘Ow’ and marched down the hall toward me as sharply as she could with her arthritis. (Which to be fair didn’t slow her down enough to make her not be faintly intimidating.)

 

“Joey Kent!” She crowed, raising an imperious eyebrow. “What’s this I hear about you planning to leave us?”

 

Oh great. Thanks Bill.

 

“It’s not you Ms. Diddle, or Dali, or anyone else in the building. I had someone I used to know show up and let themselves in, and I just don’t want to be here while I wait for the locks to get changed. You know how it is…”

 

She did know, she’d had an argument with the landlord about making up with someone too, only she’d threatened to sue him. They still didn’t get along and waged a Christmas battle of trying to kill each other with kindness…and the most horrible fruitcakes they could think of. There was a betting pool on who would be worse, but so far people were in agreement it would be hard to top her festive phallic one she’d made in a bachelor party baking pan. The other betting pool was on whether or not they’d end up dating one of these years, but so far the answer was no… that we knew of, but there was more often than not an particular smile on their faces when they went at it, and a guy upstairs had claimed he’d seen her with a fresh bouquet of Dahlia’s the other day.  
As I imagined it might have when someone unknown handed her a bouquet of her favorite flowers, her expression softened, even if her arm slap didn’t. For someone with long thin hands, she could land a blow, even being friendly, that made you wonder if she couldn’t have gone into boxing if she’d been so inclined.

 

“Psht. Joey you know you can talk to me about this sort of thing. You don’t need to sneak out like a thief. Who do we have to watch out for? Do I need to call in a favor?” She demanded as Bill wandered toward us, and I smiled in spite of everything. I was never sure if she meant it the way it sounded, but it made me picture some kind of Godfather types standing in the hallway waiting for my mother to come back. If it wasn’t what she meant I wasn’t sure I wanted to know any different. I did kind of wish she wouldn’t call me Joey, but every time I’d ever asked her she became conveniently more deaf than usual.

 

“Thanks Anyway Ms. D. Just have someone call the cops if you see someone unfamiliar trying to get in.” I figured she’d never call them personally, she had too much distaste for the system.

 

“THEM?” She snorted in distaste. “What are you hoping for? The brutality option, the bribe option or the slap on the wrist option?”

 

Bill made that ‘please don’t say that’ face again, folding and unfolding his arms and scanning the hall as though he were looking for hidden cameras. I was willing to bet it was a combination of guilt and that he’d been watching conspiracy videos on you-tube again. He always claimed he thought they were funny but then he’d twitch for days. Which was kind of funny, at least for the rest of us.

 

“The slap on the wrist option would be sufficiently humiliating for her, trust me.”

 

“Ohhh it’s girl trouble is it?” Ms. Diddle perked up even more at the prospect of imminent gossip. “Was it the cute little dish with the pink hair?”

 

Nice to know the neighbors had seen things… I guessed...“No actually…” I sighed. “The other one with her mostly, but she might try and get the other one to do it.”

 

I wondered if she would. She’d seemed damned determined to be helpful in her weird obviously unhinged way, but she was also working for my mother. Any part of that conversation could have been a trap. Probably was a trap.

 

“You ok, Joe? You look like reheated dog s-”

 

“Thanks Bill.” I cut him off, shooting him an impatient look. “You want to help me get some stuff?” I had to assume Sue had filled him in while ripping him a new one, otherwise I couldn’t think of a reason for him to be here. He must have taken some time off of work, and I wondered what he’d said to leave early.

 

“Yeah but seriously man, you look like something ran you over, then backed up to make sure.”

 

“THANKS, Bill.” I reiterated, more sharply, as Ms. Diddle patted us both on the arm, and made fretting noises. Bill made a sort of guilty, vague gesture and then air punched in the general direction of my shoulder.

 

“OK let’s go get your stuff and then maybe we should get you some hair of the dog, ‘eh?” He suggested.

 

“Oh good God no.”  
All I could think of was that mystery cocktail that had gotten me into this in the first place, and I had no plans to ever feel this bad again if I could avoid it. I must have looked as disgusted as I felt because as Ms. Diddle puttered her way back toward her door, Bill horse laughed, which hit my headache like a handful of knives.

 

“Bill, C’mon.” I groan, fumbling through my pockets for the keys to unlock the apartment again. “It’s not funny and I have a killer headache.”  
“I know, I’m really sorry, man.” He sighed, as I unlocked the door and swung it wide to let him in. “She really knew how to pitch a pity ball.” Bill pantomimed throwing a baseball as he spoke, his face screwing up comically as if he were really pitching a baseball that might win the game. These were some of the reasons it made it hard to dump Bill as a friend. He was an idiot sometimes, but he was the kind of idiot you welcomed back like a dog that occasionally went someplace it shouldn’t.  
The unintentional parallel to Dali made me fight a smile. “Yeah. Yeah she does that.”

 

“So Sue filled me in, you’re gonna crash in a hotel? You sure you don’t want the couch or something?”

 

“You mean the one you were telling me broke a spring and you found it underneath when you vacuumed? Yeah no. Thanks for the thought. It’s just… I want to be someplace else until the locks get changed. And if she figured out where I live she probably figured out where you guys live… It’s not that she might not show up anyway, but I really don’t want to be there if she does…”

 

I didn’t know if he understood, but if I were there and she showed up, I’d not only feel responsible but also trapped.

 

“Man I oughta give her a piece of my mind.” He muttered as we headed for the bedroom. Everything else looked the same, no new messages on the machine, no further signs that they’d been back to rifle through my things… Maybe they’d been too busy following me to the coffee shop and going on about some kind of bullshit vampire flu. Or maybe she'd just been subtle. Mom was always good at leaving minimal impact on her surprise inspections, at least until you noticed something missing.

 

“I oughta buy a bunch of horrible magazines or something and stash them all over the place.” I muttered out loud as we got out my backpack and suitcase and started packing things.

  
“You think she’s gonna be back to check stuff out?” Bill asked, eyeballing the suitcase and the folded shirt in his hand as though he were contemplating a move in tetris.

  
“I’d kind of be surprised if she didn’t, if she hasn’t already. It would be fun to mess with her. Maybe she’d get mad enough to do something I could actually make stick. I mean... OK fun isn’t the right word.”

  
I wasn’t sure there was a right word for it, the desire to piss someone off that scares you, just to prove to the both of you that they’ve lost their power over you. That you’ve pulled the teeth from the tiger, so to speak.

  
“Say the word, Joey Boy and I will make this place an X-rated Easter Egg hunt. Actually aren’t there some toys that look kind of like…”

  
“Bill, I kind of want to move back in at some point and not wonder what I’m going to find behind the couch when I clean the place.”

  
“Just think of it like, uh, future date bonus stuff. I mean I can get like… other stuff. Make me a list man, I don’t judge.”

  
“Bill I am going to zip you into the suitcase and roll it down the stairs.”

  
“Didn’t they do that to someone at that one frat on campus? Yeah it was uh… fuck what was his name. Morgan. He broke his arm and like three ribs and then his dad raised hell, right?”

  
“I forgot about that…” I admitted, picking up a pair of sleep pants and wondering if it was entirely immature to kind of want to pack my favorite mug to go with them. Both the mug and the pants had the Superman Logo. Sue and Bill had gotten them both for me when I’d gotten my first publishing deal. We’d drunk champagne out of it. Bill had the Green lantern, Sue had Wonder Woman. The pants were getting a bit threadbare but I hadn’t given up on them yet (but I had added a few equally ‘nerdy’ pairs) I tucked it beside the bag, figuring I could use them to wrap the mug. I wasn’t going to leave it here, not if there was a chance of HER sniffing out the sentimental value it had.

  
“Heh, no surprise. You were kinda busting your butt trying to keep up with classes and work. I’m surprised we never had to set a life guard to keep you from drowning in your cereal bowl.”

  
“Yeah, but you guys helped pull me through. I don’t know that I could have done it without you.”

  
And here we were again, with them offering to scrape me off the floor.

 

It wasn’t hard to pack up the things I’d probably need for a short stay, and only a moment to wrap up my mug and tuck it safely with everything else. Bill grinned when he watched me pack it.

 

“Joe Kent versus Lexi Luthor.” He joked. “That would be an nice spin off.”

 

“Yeah but she’s got all the kryptonite.” I fired back, shrugging the backpack onto my shoulder. “...You know if you guys want to lay low a couple days too so she doesn’t get on your case, I can maybe help spring for a couple extra rooms…”

 

“I’m good man, Hal Jordan never crashed at the Fortress of Solitude, I’m pretty sure. But I’ll tell the girls. They might want to take a vacation where someone else pays for the Jacuzzi.” He joked, then put a hand on my shoulder. “How bout you let me carry that stuff. You look like you’re gonna pass out man.”

 

“I’m gonna be ok.” I promised, though the second I said it I wasn’t sure if I was lying or not. Like a paper-cut starting to smart when you realized it was there, not only did I still have the damn headache, which still had my jaws and teeth aching from its attempts to take root, but I felt slightly off balance and tired. It was like having the flu, but I didn’t feel feverish. “It’s mostly hangover, but I might be catching something.”

 

“You sure she wasn’t a vampire?” Bill teased, grabbing the backpack from me. I tried to fight him for it, but I wasn’t on the ball enough to get a good hand hold before he’d already slipped it onto his own shoulder, and he did an awkward sort of dance step to grab the suitcase before I could pick up that either. “Stick with the laptop bag, Joey-boy. If this gets worse I’m dragging your ass to a doctor, Patient Zero.”

 

“You’re just worried I’ll put you off your game next weekend.” I accused, throwing a mock punch his direction, though I was actually grateful he’d taken the bags.

 

“Man you have no idea. If I had some crazy lady telling me I was turning into a vampire I would haul ass to the club with a set of fake fangs. Have you seen how many books are out there on how sexy vampires are?”

 

“Not if you felt this crappy.” I grumbled, feeling too achy to even argue with him about not wanting to hear the ‘v’ word ever again.

 

“Yeah I guess there’s that, huh? Hey, I know your piece of crap is in the shop, let’s take my car, ok? Maybe it’ll throw off Crazy Mom. You want to like, get some Groucho Marx glasses or something?” He joked as we closed up and started back down the stairs. Ms Diddle was no place to be found this time.

 

“I’ll pass on the Groucho glasses I think. I’d probably walk into something at the way this day is going.

 

“Seriously. Let’s get you stowed away for a nice little vacation and we’ll get you some room service or something. Unless you’re feeling gross, then just, I dunno, we’ll pick up some soup and a hot plate or something.”

 

“Food...actually sounds amazing.”

 

And it did.

  
It was almost weird, but maybe it just meant part of my problem was some kind of blood sugar crash. I’d only eaten lightly today after all, I just kept being interrupted. I felt exhausted, my head still hurt, and I felt even downright queasy, but food… food sounded amazing, almost to the extent where it felt like someone had cut a hole in the pit of my stomach. In particular, in spite of my vague nausea and pain, I wanted a steak. A really good one, a little char on the outside, just a little pink in the middle… if someone had plopped a table and a menu in front of me I wasn’t entirely convinced I wouldn’t take a steak with a side of a second steak. “Food really… really sounds amazing.” I reiterated, biting my lip. What time was it? Was the steak restaurant open? Could we make it for lunch?

  
No, I needed to do something with my damn bags first. Get a room… Then I could get food.

  
“OK… just… bear with me one sec.” Joe pulled out his cell phone and started paging through something with his thumb. He could punch things into the tiny keyboard with just his thumb as well, something that frustrated the hell out of me, who usually had to do a careful hunt and peck (and miss) with an index finger. Joe was infuriatingly technically savvy sometimes. “You look like that time you tried to experiment with modern malnutrition and scurvy from the All-Ramen diet. I am just going to demonstrate to you the powers of my wonder gadget, the cell phone… you have heard of these devices I am sure…” He winked. Of course I knew. We had each others numbers, I just didn’t use mine with the frequency he did his. My baby was my laptop, his was his phone. “And I am going call the hotel…”

  
“Oh my God, my backward mind is baffled by your wizardry.” I drolled back, trying not to bite my lip in lieu of a juicy slab of perfectly cooked beef. He waved me off as someone on the other hand picked up, and I watched him do a transformation from clownish Bill to ‘professional’ Bill. He straightened up, even though the person on the other end of the line couldn’t see him, flashed a charming, slightly artificially whitened smile and even ran his hands over his hair to make sure that the short cropped black hair wasn’t out of place.

“Yes Hi, Barry; I’m calling to see about booking a room for a… hm… a moderately extended stay. About a week I think, do you have anything available, starting today? I realize it’s short notice, but the circumstances are sort of… well yeah. There was a broken pipe.” He paused, smiling and nodding and added. “Wow, if it’s anything like I saw, tell your Sister in law she has my sympathies. It’s a real nightmare…” Another pause and… “Yes that sounds fantastic! That’s just perfect. Me? Oh I’m Bill, Bill Mason, but I’m … Actually no skip that, this is going on my card.”

  
“Bill!” I made a grab for the phone, but an inch taller than me and spending more time at the gym, he easily bent out of the way, fending me off with one arm and kept talking as though I wasn’t trying to wrest the phone from him or interrupt. “Yeah. Yeah that’s great. And we can just check in when we get there? Fantastic! Thanks so much! I know a couple guys great with repairs so if your sister in law needs any help let me know. I’ll pass some information along. Yep! Thanks again! Bye!”  
All this while stuffing a hand in my face and ignoring my sputters. “Bill what the hell! I said I’ve got this!”

  
“Yeah I know.” He clicked the phone off and pocketed it smoothly. “You can buy lunch instead. I’m having… hmm. I think they’ve still got that absolutely fabulous fillet at the Three Barrels. Let’s go there.” He grinned, then let his face drop into something more serious. “Look. I owe you one. I told your mom where to find you, that’s on me. I’d rather not make it any easier for her to find you again. If you want to pay me back later I’m game, but right now, let’s concentrate on making you a missing person.”  
“Maybe we can concentrate on dropping my bags and getting a good table at the Barrels.” I suggested, as my stomach tried again to tie itself in knots, with guilt over the price of the hotel room as a nice ribbon on the package. “Then I can plot revenge. Does it count as revenge when someone does something expensively generous?”

  
“Hey you’re the author, aren’t you supposed to know these things?” He pointed out, spreading his hands slightly as he started walking again. I followed him dutifully, and felt my entire system reel again. Maybe it was just low blood sugar and an over reactive imagination… and the hangover of course. Maybe I’d find out if I didn’t stagger dizzily into traffic or something.  
“Don’t look at me, I research the hell out of stuff when I need to, then forget it all.” I joked, as Bill put a hand back on my shoulder. I wasn’t even mad at him anymore, the jerk. He was just too damn forgivable.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And things continue, and continue to get weirder for Joe.   
>  This is also were a guy I used to know got into a debate with me if Candice was a 'manic pixie dream girl', because of her pink hair. 
> 
> ...She's kind of not. I mean, you could see her that way. But she's not I don't think.

Pearson's Place was a nice place, if you liked a certain desperate clinging devotion to the illusion that it was the sort of place where you might have found Audrey Hepburn or Clark Gable slouching artistically on the heavy furniture in the entrance lounge. They’d updated things here and there, but the devotion to the decor was almost slavish, and a somewhat strange mixture of art Deco and Victorian. You could tell it was intended to be elegant, but it had been handled by people with very conflicting ideas on how exactly ‘elegant’ worked, and unfortunately, they’d apparently decided to compromise by throwing everything together in a blender.

For all that, they were known for comfortable accommodations, good, if not great, food, and most importantly for me, free wi-fi available throughout the hotel. I’d never had cause to stay here before, but having a chance to look it over in person made me wonder if they’d covered the routers in gilt paint. 

Bill checked me in, flashing that ‘professional Bill’ smile again, to Barry no less, who I wouldn’t have pegged as a Barry. I wasn’t sure what I would have decided a ‘Barry’ looked like, but the slightly pear shaped man with a hint of Latino ancestry and a bland pair of glasses that didn’t quite suit his face wasn’t it. It probably didn’t help that I kind of wanted to picture him wearing a Flash t-shirt instead of the neat, powder blue button down and suit coat, but that was just my inner nerd trying to find something funny in an not terribly funny day. I must have been looking, because he looked over at me, flashed me a slightly forced smile and looked back to his computer. I wanted to read something into it, but I wasn’t sure quite what. Probably nothing more than ‘please don’t stare at me, random stranger’. 

Bill chatted with him a few minutes more, they laughed, and Bill wrote down some information on a slip of paper and passed it over to him, which Barry looked to appreciate. I had to assume it was the contractors Bill had been talking about earlier. If they were the guys I thought they were, they did good work, and they’d helped remodel Suzie and Alex’s place gorgeously. Made me wish I had a house for them to work on instead of my apartment. Right now though I was glad for the flexibility that I could look for a new place to rent though, instead of slogging through listings. It was a trade off I guessed, and it had been part of the reason I had originally rented instead of purchased, but somehow I’d never actually thought it would come down to this.

Bill thumped me on the shoulder again, gently, as he walked over to where I leaned against a faux-marble pillar, and helped grab my bags. “Ok, you’re all set. The elevators are over this way. I told them it’s fine if you order room service too so you don’t even have to go out if you don’t feel like it.”

“Yeah but I owe you a steak.”

“Steaks can wait for whenever you feel like it, you know? Let’s get this stuff upstairs and see how you’re feeling.”

The elevators at the far end of the lobby were actually new, you could see the glimpses of shiny new chrome, but someone had gone through a lot of trouble to make them look older than they were, with shiny criss crossed brass gates that were actually trapped fixtures behind thick glass, the better to avoid lawsuits when someone stuck a finger in and got it pinched. 

“Maybe I should have gone with a motel or something, I feel like I need to be wearing a suit just to step out of my room, and I’m pretty sure I only have a sports coat. I think that’s a little beneath the dress code.” I joked, leaning against the inside rail of the elevator as we stepped inside. I was still starving, but it conflicted with the desire to crawl back into bed again. I wasn’t sure which sounded better right now, I just wanted someone else to make the decisions for me. I’d feel guilty about it, but it would be so much easier. I didn’t quite get it myself, it always seemed like after growing up with my mother that it would be more comforting to make all decisions myself, but when everything came down to me being at the end of a frayed rope, it always seemed so tempting to put everything in someone else’s hands, but I always hung back from actually suggesting it. I was always a little afraid I’d sound just a bit crazy. 

“Oh you’re fine. Besides in all the books and stuff people always stay at the dive hotels, at least with this one you can be pretty sure there’s going to be someone at the front desk and it will take more than a credit card to jimmy the lock on your room. I mean if you’re really really attached to the idea of hiding in some dive where your roommate is a six inch roach called Bertha… well I mean I’m not going to cancel the reservation this place but there’s a pet store across town that has Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches.”

“I absolutely do not want a Cockroach for a roommate. Or a spider.” I shuddered. Bill was fond of creepy crawlies, and I knew he had a… what the hell was it. A Technicolor tarantula or something, but I had forbidden him from bringing the thing along on our weekends out, or from showing me pictures, and he had been good enough to oblige.   
“They aren’t that bad, jeeze. Lots of people keep them as pets!”  
“Yet, remarkably you are the only one I’ve met who keeps something in a fish tank that’s not a fish.”  
“Terrarium. The word you are looking for is Terrarium.”   
The elevator dinged as we reached our floor, and I pushed away from the wall and stepped out, grateful to escape the space as though the ceiling vent might vomit out a load of things that should not, in my book, be kept as pets.   
The upper hallways were much like the downstairs, the same confused mixture of Victorian and Art Deco designs bumping elbows into each other uncomfortably like overcrowded strangers on a bus, and they were made stranger partners by the ornate doors partnered with expensive looking card locks. Bill handed me the one for my room, which came in a neat little paper sleeve, the better to make it look immaculate and sterile. The paper sleeve was black, and so was the key-card, though the key-card also had the hotel’s name on it in neat, slightly embellished gold script. There was no room number, which I suspected was so that if it fell into the wrong hands, the wrong hands wouldn’t be able to just find their way to the room it was keyed to while they sorted out re-carding the door.   
Definitely a step up from the cheap motel we’d been joking about. Half joking about. Trust Bill I guess. His tendency to watch conspiracy videos had paid off for once, in ways that did not involve Suzan and I trying not to laugh as he muttered anxiously about seeing an MIB on the bus or the anti vaxxer stance was secretly a plot to prey upon the gullible by an yet more terrifying force. Almost had to give that one credit. Almost. Getting people to just… not treat the treatable when they were capable of it was certainly a bit simpler sounding than trying to engineer a super bug, and way less traceable. I’d tucked it behind my ear for future plots, though it seemed like a risky one. Hate mail really wasn’t the sort of thing I wanted to deal with, if I could possibly avoid it, and that was a damn hot topic.   
Between that and making up stories about vampires stalking the night trying to corrupt people into their evil ranks, I guess we never quite got past looking for the boogie man, we just… slapped different faces on it. It used he be goblins and fairies and changeling's, now it was GMOs and vaccinations and things like that.   
The hall carpet was fairly new, but there were still lines starting to show, which said something about the amount of use this hotel saw. We unlocked the door with an beep that attempted to be musical and failed, and stumbled inside the place where I’d be staying for theoretically the next week, hopefully not more.   
I slumped one of my bags down next to the wall and collapsed into the nearest chair, an overstuffed armchair that smelled faintly like cleaning agents and something that might have been lavender. Something felt lumpy beside the cushion and I fished out, to my surprise, an actual sachet of lavender that had slipped down inside. I wasn’t entirely clear if it had been stashed there by a previous guest, but I wasn’t sure this was normal hotel room add on material. “Geeze. Little bit grandma’s house…” I sighed, tossing it in the direction of the bed and it’s heavy, red and gold duvet cover. Definitely more Victorian in here than Art Deco. Maybe even a hair Gothic, and that irony wasn’t lost on me under the circumstances. There were even thick dark red curtains pushed to the side of the large windows on the far side of the room, which led out onto a small, cramped balcony.   
“Did you scope this place out before you rented it?” I asked, accusingly. Bill made a face and spread his hands in a gesture of innocence that could have been feigned, but was hard to be sure. Usually if he was bullshitting us he made it fairly obvious.   
“I’ve had clients stay here but I haven’t. They seemed to like it, so I went with it.”  
“I would accuse you of busting my balls but I’m too tired and hungry.” I sighed, sinking deeper into the chair as he put the other bags on the bed, unzipping them as though he were the one staying here, and fishing out the Superman Mug, which he deposited with an air of ceremony next to the in room coffee maker. It was the kind that ran on pods, which I supposed made sense. Easier than vacuuming grounds off the rug because someone was having issues.   
“You still want to go hit the Three Barrels or do you want me to just order in?” I had closed my eyes, but I could hear the frown in Bill’s voice as he walked back my way, and made me jump slightly by, without warning, putting his wrist to my forehead. “I think you might be running a temperature dude…” He noted, warily. “I mean… not a big one, but you feel a little warm.”  
I batted him off in annoyance, but didn’t immediately open my eyes.   
“I can do the Barrels.” I promised, perhaps over ambitiously, but my pride was at stake here. And the food at the Barrels was a known quantity (and quality) and room service was not. I’d stayed in a few hotels on signing tours and they had yet to measure up to actually going to a restaurant, but maybe I was just unlucky. “Just gimme a sec.”  
I rubbed my eyes wearily, and then forced myself to sit up, and start with the mundane task of putting my key card in my wallet. “You were the party guy in college… well anyway you knew all the party guys. Is this fucking normal?”  
“Well… I dunno. Headache and the queasiness seem pretty spot on but I’ve seen you drink more and not be this wiped out.”  
“I know… I can’t figure it out. I mean, I don’t think anything… you know… happened.” I stumbled awkwardly over the possibilities. “Ok this is stupid. Let’s go get food. It’s just a hangover and my mother trying to cram her way back into my life.”   
“Ha… that’s the spirit.” Bill didn’t sound quite sold on my burst of conviction, but I aimed to continue running on that burst of energy until I could at least get some food. “Let’s call a cab.”  
——————  
I hated to spring for a Cab, most of the time, but with my car and energy levels out of the running, and not being sure I wanted my car being anywhere near where I was staying anyway… I was currently rather down with throwing some extra money down the tube just to get me to the food before I either fell asleep on the street or started chewing on a lamp post. It wasn’t even a bad ride, quiet, fairly short, and left us as we entered the Three Barrels, an very forced ‘olde time’ style pub and steak house. They had something more of a sense of humor about it though, and the walls were hung with a series of paintings done by some old master, all of which featured monks imbibing various spirits and looking generally pleased with a world in which such things existed. The lighting was bright, the wood features dark, and the atmosphere pretty open and jovial for a pub. They didn’t even try and disguise the mixed eras, but did have the courtesy to make a big ‘game lounge’ separate from the rest of the bar, with not one but three big TVs, with chairs and tables and couches, just so you could watch the game at the bar and still not interrupt the people who were there for the incredible food.   
If it hadn’t been so noisy, it was the kind of place I’d have probably gone instead of a coffee house to write. Though the fact it was a bit more expensive than our usual crawls didn’t help either. Three Barrels was the place we went when we’d done something especially worth celebrating, but today I would count getting my mother to leave when I told her to a more than worthy occasion to celebrate, regardless of how long it took me to sort out the rest of the details.   
“Do you want to see if Sue can make it?” I asked, as we slid into a booth, flipping open menu’s even though we were both reasonably sure of what we were going to order. Even the walk from the cab to the booth made me feel more tired than I liked to admit. It felt good to sit down. At least the headache seemed to have become something like a tired background noise though. Flipping over the familiar menu was slightly soothing, though I lingered over the appetizer page, knowing it would take a little while for the main course to get to the table, and not sure I could wait that long. “Hey you wanna split a side or something? Like some fried cheese or some potato skins?” I asked, propping up my head on my hand.  
“Shouldn’t you take it a little easier captain hangover?” Bill pointed out. “I mean we’re good friends but I think I have filled my good behavior quota for the day without having to hold your hair back while you barf. The graffiti in the bathroom isn’t that interesting.”  
“I don’t think I’m going to throw up. I mean… last time I was hung over I didn’t want to eat. Right now I could eat the silverware.”  
Bill looked thoughtful again, then glanced down a the menu. “Let’s skip the cheese sticks… still don’t want to play the hangover game with you no matter what you say. Um. Let’s see.”

 

We ended up settling on a mix of corn fritters with dipping sauce, and chicken wings, both of which were a hair greasier than Bill was thrilled with, but which looked, and smelled, amazing, when the waiter slid them onto the table in front of us. We still hadn’t reached a consensus on Sue, but it was a conversation that had been slightly derailed by discussing the symptoms of a hangover that I did, or did not, have, and in a burst of childishness, I picked up one of the finger scorchingly hot fritters, dunked it in the sauce and took a bite before being forced to drop it onto an appetizer plate to save my fingertips, flapping a hand as though that would cool off the burning on my tongue not touched by the cool sauce.   
A firm ‘Serves you right’ and a raised eyebrow was all the sympathy I got on the matter, but I supposed I did. Didn’t care either. It was delicious anyway, though I still ached for the steak to arrive at the table. The other food was good, even the chicken, which came closer to scratching that particular itch, but not quite.   
“So did you want to ping Suzie?” Bill asked, after we had cleaned our way through most of the appetizers. “Although I suppose we should have really done that sooner.”  
“Nah, she’s… she’s worried enough.” I decided thoughtfully. Bill was too, but we were eating. It wasn’t like I was going to kick him out of the booth before the main course had gotten here. “Not that you aren’t…” I added, with a wry look, mopping up a bit of sauce with the last edge of a corn fritter, savoring the taste as I finished it off.   
If I wasn’t afraid of setting off the fire alarm trying to fry at home, I’d have considered trying to make them myself. All the recipes seemed simple enough, but like many, I suffered from the fear of the unfamiliar in the kitchen. The ‘what if’s’ list was large and a bit frightening, and my active imagination provided situations up to, and including, burning down the entire apartment building.   
“Well, can you blame her? Everything’s been sort of crazy. It was just supposed to be a night out with Suze and I high fiving on the way home because you met a seriously gorgeous woman and got picked up. I mean hell that’s pretty awesome. Especially for you Mr ‘My Social Life revolves around two people I’ve known since college’. And… then all the sudden it’s your MOM showing up, and… I swear to God I feel so stupid for buying into it but she honest to god made everything sound like she really wanted to help you, and then I find out that ‘oh shit’ she is literally everything you ever told us she was, and then there’s you feeling all wonky and of course we’re worried.”  
“Yeah… no I get it. I mean, I’m familiar with her tricks and she scares me…” I pinched the bridge of my nose, feeling an ghostly zing of headache fire through my head again at the subject. The crunch and thump of backing over her mail box was suddenly unpleasantly sharp and clear.   
“Everything since I woke up has been surreal.” I admitted. “I mean I’m doing what I can but… just having her show up this long after I kicked her out of my life feels… it feels like I wasn’t able to do enough. Like I might never be able to.”  
“You can do it. You got -that far- on your own at eighteen. She does not have the law on her side, and you have us on your side. We can do this.” Bill promised. There was a brief interruption then, as the waiter slid two steak plates in front of us, still sizzling and hot and perfect, and I closed my eyes for a second to savor the moment. I was so damn hungry for that stupid piece of meat I didn’t think I would have appreciated it more if it had been brought to me by gorgeous people wearing very little other than a touch of body oil and a smile.   
“So. Awkward question time. All this vampire shit, you never really got into that. How did she try and sell you on the whole Vampire thing?” Bill’s voice interrupted, punctuated by the clink of silverware as he started sawing into his steak aggressively, as though he could cut through the tension of the moment with his steak knife.   
I paused for a moment, then unwrapped my own silverware and started digging into my own steak. “Well… stories maybe. She’d describe it in detail. Linger over how they hunt their victims, that they look human but they’re actually… I don’t know… demons or something. She went into a lot of detail about what they could and couldn’t do. That the stories were wrong, that they can go out in the sun. She used to go into these huge theories about how they were behind… behind everything that went wrong in the world. Murders, crime of almost any kind… anything that challenged the safe little suburban bubble. Heck she was really huge on how the whole Dracula thing was to lead us all astray because most of them were ‘dark’. “Dark in body and spirit.” She’d put it. I always felt like that was… creepy, but that was dad’s influence. Without him… I don’t know. Without him I just don’t know how I’d have turned out. I don’t think I’d be… I don’t think I’d be me. That’s why it hurt so much when he was gone. There was no one to remind me that there was another point a view. No one else I was allowed to talk to anyway. Not really.   
She even made it hard to get money together. I tried really hard to make sure she wouldn’t know what was going on, but I think she kind of guessed. I had to actually hide my cash from her. Almost didn’t work. She found a couple stashes and made them vanish, but I still managed to save enough to buy a car, and I just… I just drove. And then I got into college, and I met you guys and … well you know those parts.   
“Sometimes I think we know the parts you’re ok with people knowing.” Bill sighed, looking at me wearily. “You look a little more alert anyway, but dude, you’ve started to get this sort of Casper thing going on. It’s kind of creepy. Are you sure you’re up for this? I can get a to-go box.” He suggested.   
“Yeah I think so. I’m just tired. Besides I said I’d buy lunch. I’m buying lunch.”  
“Yep, that’s the Joe I know. Stubborn as hell. Did you get that from her or from your dad?”  
“I like to think it’s from my Dad.”

——————-

I felt alright, or at least something resembling human all the way back to the door of Pearsons Place, where I said a temporary goodbye to Bill and made my way back inside. Then as though everything that was wrong had been waiting to pounce on me in a moment of vulnerability, everything came slowly creeping in. Every step through the lobby felt increasingly heavy, like there were bricks tied to my arms and legs, and by the time I made it to the upstairs hallway, I felt as though I were carrying an backpack full of cinder blocks. Before I even got down the hallway, I had started to feel feverish. Just a little at first, but as though it grew with every step, it got worse every step I took toward my room, until my clothes were damp with sweat, but I felt cold, and sore. What had started as a headache and then faded had somehow crawled down into every muscle fiber and bone. I swiped the key card, stumbled into the room and dropped my wallet on the dresser. The room tilted as I did so, and I was desperately afraid I would fall over. I didn’t understand what was wrong… I didn’t feel nauseous, just… just horribly sick. Heavy. Like I had in the back of her car. I was sure now, or maybe it was the fever, that it was an actual memory.

Fun. This wasn’t fun. Was this her idea of fun? 

I grabbed for a chair arm, fumbling for my phone and trying to stubbornly stay on my feet. Don’t fall down. Don’t sit down, you won’t get back up, and the bed felt as though it were a mile away and drawing away from me by the moment.

I remembered scrolling through the phone with my thumb, having to use only one hand because I knew if I let go of the chair arm with my other hand, I’d be on the carpet. I thumbed at the contacts, vision blurring and hoping that I’d hit the right one as I pressed the phone to my ear. 

The womans voice at the other end sounded like it was coming from a great distance, warped and distorted as they questioned “Hello? Hello?”

“Suz.” I managed, relieved. “Suz I don’t…” I struggled to even string words together but I was too tired. Too achy. I just wanted to close my eyes and not open them again until… until I don’t know. The last thing I remembered before my eyelids slammed shut was trying to say “Help” into the phone, and then everything sank into a hot, suffocating black. 

I woke up on the bed. No… woke is the wrong word for it, saying I woke up implies I had full control over my own body, not the terrifying heaviness that made me feel like I was being pressed into the mattress, and someone was putting a wet hand towel on my forehead. I couldn’t even acknowledge the relief of this with more than a weary grunt, trying to blink at them through heavy eyelids. 

I expected it to be Sue’s thick, unruly black curls that always escaped piecemeal from her trademark braid. Maybe one of her favorite loud looking band shirts, but what I saw instead was a blurry shape in black, topped with a shock of bubblegum pink. I could barely move, but I managed a feeble jerk of unpleasant surprise never the less, breath catching in my throat. 

“Easy Kent.” Candice’s voice was pitched like you’d talk to a skittish horse or a distressed child. “Just me. I didn’t bring company, but you sure didn’t make it easy to find you… or get in.”

I wondered how she had, but my head felt too thick to try and think of a solution that didn’t require an impressive degree of suspending disbelief. Somehow I wouldn’t have put it past her to somehow climb up the balcony though. 

“ ‘Was trying to call Susan…” I muttered, accusingly, though it took a ridiculous amount of effort to do even this. 

“Good thing you accidentally got me then. If you showed up in the hospital you’d have Helen here with me.” She pointed out, with a bland reasonable tone that absolutely chafed at me. It kind of killed me that she was probably right. Susan would have called the hospital. I wouldn’t have blamed her. I wasn’t sure it was the wrong choice even, save for the part where my mother would come storming down the place. I didn’t want that. I just wanted to feel better… and sleep. But I didn’t know that I trusted Pinkie either. 

“ You tell her?” 

“Helen? No.” Pinkie dismissed my question as though I’d asked if the sky were Paisley. “She’d kill you.”

I didn’t have a lot of energy, but that made me jolt again, and I fought to sit up. Something about her tone did not make me think she was being metaphorical. I wasn’t even as shocked as I thought I ought to be, but not shocked and not afraid weren’t the same thing. 

“She what?” Some small part of the exhaustion shook away, or maybe it was just the wet cloth falling onto my shirt. Candice caught my shoulder a moment later, and stuck the spare pillow behind me with a fast, expert move that made me wonder if she’d ever had to handle this before. 

“She. Would. Kill you.” Candice repeated, snatching up the wet cloth and moving it to the side. “I told you, Lily gave you vampire blood. It’s not food poisoning, or the flu, or a hangover, but it’s pretty fucking brutal anyway. It’s why she had me checking your teeth. She miscalculated when you’d been dosed though, but I think that was part of Lily’s plan… whatever the hell her plan is.” She chatted almost conversationally as she wandered around the room, fishing out a small container of coconut water and pouring it into the Superman mug, and all I could do was listen in disbelief, the pillow propped uncomfortably between my shoulder blades to hold me up. “Don’t get me wrong. I think there’s a world of difference between ‘not human’ and a monster, but Lily’s too fucking old and angry for my comfort levels. She’s playing chess, and you’re on the board.”

She was unable to find a straw, so she jabbed a couple coffee stirrers into the cup and walked back over, holding it sharply under my chin. “I just don’t know what her next move is.”

This was not a conversation I was sure I was ready to have, but I wasn’t sure there was a point to be ready for a conversation where your own mother turns out to have murder on her mind. Particularly when it’s your life on the line. 

Remembering what Pinkie had been doing this morning, I cautiously probed at my own teeth with my tongue, ignoring the coconut water for now. I didn’t find fangs, and what should have been an obvious conclusion felt like a relief; until I noticed that one of them felt loose. No, two of them. I’d have considered maybe that I might have taken some damage hitting the floor, but my face didn’t feel bruised, and my lips weren’t cut from impacting other teeth. 

“Her timeline was off.” Candice noted. “Maybe by tonight.” She raised an eyebrow. “Teeth right? Don’t freak out, you won’t look like a movie extra, but I bet you bite your cheek for a while.” She smirked in amusement, and jiggled the mug, sloshing the contents slightly. “Coconut water. It’s not a good substitute for increasing your iron, and it won’t give you any hemoglobin boost, but it’ll rehydrate you, which will help a bit.”

“Why would you help?” I drew my knees up and moved to take the cup with shaky hands. She let me, maybe only so she could watch me wear part of it as I almost dropped the mug and had to take it with two hands. 

“Good question isn’t it?” She smirked, while I struggled to take a drink without wearing the entire mug. The effort felt astronomical, and it was frustrating, as though I should be able to shake it off. “Technically you should probably be getting an IV but your system is just going to have to suck it up… so to speak.” She paced around at a short distance, and my already tight shoulders knotted up a little more in response to her predatory posturing. I wasn’t sure what I would have done if she had decided to pounce though. Aggressively fall off the bed? Sounded like a great plan. Maybe I’d break my nose and really show her a thing or two. 

“Phone?” I questioned, after I managed to actually get some of the coconut water into my mouth, and down my throat. Like the hunger that hadn’t kicked in until I’d thought about food, it was suddenly something I not only wanted but needed. I just couldn’t wrap my head around how I’d gotten so hungry and so … so everything… so fast. Maybe I should be calling my actual friends. Maybe I should take the gamble and go to the hospital. Would they be able to keep her out if I told them a total stranger had picked me up off the floor, and told me someone might be trying to kill me?

“Bedside table.” She fired back, unhelpfully, with another smirk. We both knew that span, a little over an arms reach from me, might as well have been the Grand Canyon right now. Was that it then? That was the plan to basically keep me hostage to my own physical limits? Bill would call on me eventually, but that didn’t mean I’d be able to get to the phone by then. I spared a moment of energy to scowled at her, and took another sip, which felt little more effective than pouring water on a patch of desert, but however marginal, I guessed it was helping. I just wasn’t sure how long it would take before I couldn’t hold it up any longer. 

“Now what.” I asked, after a long pause, trying to rest the mug between my chest and hands. Maybe I could hold it up that way and just use the pathetic little stir straws. At least it was marginally keeping me awake, when I otherwise felt as though I could easily drift back to sleep. Maybe getting her to talk would get something out of her anyway, even if it was useless. Keeping her here might buy me time for -real- Calvary to arrive anyway. I just wished I had more energy to actually ask the questions. I could barely form them coherently, though I could feel them half formed and swimming through my head. 

“That’s sorta down to you.” She brushed her fingers through her hair, shifting her weight and studying me with that same predator stare. “You skipped all the parts where your mom would have told you how this works didn’t you. “Vampire Bullshit.” Right?” She asked, making air quotes. 

OK. We were back on this. I shut my eyes in frustration, jaw clenched as long as I could maintain the effort. From the sound of her weight shifting, the rustle of her clothes, I guessed she had noticed my reaction, and imagined the eye roll that she probably answered with. It seemed in character for her. Closing my eyes came with it’s own risk though, I had to catch the mug from tilting and spilling because with my eyelids shut, the urge to just go to sleep was so powerful that it almost pulled me down, and forcing my eyelids back open as I caught the mug made my head spin. Fuck, this was insane. 

I realized somewhere in the back of my head that she’d continued talking, and I wasn’t sure what about. I guess I hadn’t been as obvious as I thought, or maybe she simply thought I was conserving energy. 

“What?” I asked, blearily. I wasn’t sure what I was hoping for, that she might either get annoyed and stop talking or that she would repeat herself. I’m not sure I was hoping anything at that point. She’d already implied I was going to loose some teeth. What teeth were they again? Right… it was the pointy ones… because of course it was. 

“You’re basically suffering from what might as well be blood loss, or low hemoglobin.” Pinkie started again, with a heavy sigh, then continued talking. Something over my head about a theory about mutualistic something or other and metabolism and hemoglobin and iron and… and I didn’t track a goddamn word of it. Well… I tracked a few words, but they were disconnected and as hard to string together as soap bubbles. I wasn’t sure it would have made a difference even if I’d been feeling well. I blinked at her, owlishly,and tried to drink a little more coconut water, hoping it wasn’t poisoned, because I wasn’t sure even that would have stopped me from trying to drink it. I felt so crappy.

A nice cup of like… French onion soup… that sounded even better though. Something with nice beef broth.   
Wait. Supposed to be tracking the conversation. Try not to look quite so owlishly stupid. Or do. Did it matter? Apparently someone was going to murder me anyway. Maybe I could just fucking sleep through it. 

“Sorry?” I blinked, heavily. She looked exasperated.

“You need blood to live, Renfield.” She snapped. 

That helped shake me awake a little more, and she snapped into slightly sharper focus as I stared at her. “Bullshit…”

“You’re the one who drank vampire blood.” She pointed out, as though this were obvious, and my fault. 

“Says you…” I growled, taking another, longer drink. Maybe I could finish the mug. Maybe she’d go away. “Still bull… not real.”

“Yeah tell me that when you grow a couple new teeth. You need it to live. Boosting your iron will help, but eventually… you’re gonna need it. She walked back over, leaned against the bed and snatched the mug out of my hand, putting it beside the phone. “If the starting change doesn’t kill you. Or your mom doesn’t. She’s good at that part. But I think a tiny part of you probably knows that.”

I grasp at empty air for a moment, frowning because I just don’t know what the hell to make of any of this. She wants to help, she doesn’t want to help… or does she want something from me that requires her to help? Or am I just sounding particularly rude because I feel half dead.

“I’m… I’m drawing the line at opera capes.” I joked, desperately. Go to self defense. When in doubt, make a joke. She blinked.

“What?”

“Too cliche’. No capes.” I repeat, tiredly, not sure if worked, or if she’s going to storm out, or tell my mother where I am. There’s a long, tense pause, and mixed emotions and thoughts working themselves out in her eyes, and then she laughs. 

“Keep your head down, Kent. You might make it through this in one piece, and you’re starting to make me almost like you.” 

——————

I didn’t remember falling asleep again, but I must have. I had unpleasant dreams about that damn red drink, and feeling heavy afterward, in the back of that car, while the woman laughed in delight. She had an attractive laugh, it made everything brighter, but there were sinister things behind it, and Candice’s dire warning about ‘the starting change’. 

When I woke up again, Candice had let herself out, and the hotel room was quiet. My mug and phone were on the table beside the bed, and the pillows still propped up behind me. Not the most comfortable position I had ever slept in, but I was fairly sure ‘comfort’ had very little to do with anything right now. The heaviness and exhaustion were still there, but it seemed… less. Not much less, but enough that the span between me and my phone didn’t seem quite so inconceivable. The hotel phone was there too, and the thought about something like a soup with beef broth popped back into my head, juggled between that and calling Suz and Bill. 

The fact I was actually debating between food and calling my friends and telling them that my mother might up her game to attempted murder was ridiculous as hell. Yet here we were. What would I even tell them though. Everything revolved around the absolutely mad idea that I was somehow turning into something that was only supposed exist in mediocre fiction. 

Ok. Think. Actually think. Force something coherent through that foggy useless skull of yours, Joe Kent. I don’t have enough steam right now to waste any of it. And… yes. It… I think it helped. Right until it didn’t. OK. I’m… functionally sick. Steak tasted amazing. Everything tasted amazing, but maybe I just pushed myself too hard. Was that stupid? I always thought overtaxing your digestive system was more likely to get you an express stamp ‘return to sender’, but…  
But I don’t know. There’s part of me thats not sure Pinkie isn’t wrong, not entirely, even if I don’t think she’s right about the why.

But I also don’t know if she’s found out whatever she needed and is sending my mother over as we speak. She works for her after all. I’m pretty sure, if she’s telling the truth, an lobby and a key card aren’t going to keep her out. Talking to Bill and either changing rooms or getting out of here might be the next step, But I can’t go back to my place, and I can’t stay with them… 

In one of my books, there’d be some brilliant plot twist where a secret stronghold opens up and gives the beleaguered hero's someplace to hide out, but I don’t think I have anything like that. The closest equivalent I could think of would be to buy a trailer and head out to the woods with a shot gun. Try that for a fortress of solitude.  
I should call the cops. I should. But I just… I can’t help thinking I’m going to get laughed out of the place. I know it’s Mom’s training in part. ‘Don’t air dirty laundry’, but also: 

I guess I know what I’m going to do then. I roll over heavily, and snag the phone, drawing it to me.

“Hi… Suz? Could you call Bill? We gotta talk.”

——

“OK. I’m asking them about moving your room, but I guess they’re a little booked so it might take some time.” Bill hung up the hotel phone a bit too hard, taking out his feelings on it. He couldn’t stop glaring at me, and I couldn’t stop ducking the accusing stare. His first words when he’d come into the room had been more or less. “I thought you said you were fine!”, and he hadn’t forgiven me for being desperately wrong about that since. Sue wasn’t too thrilled either, and was sitting on my foot (I was pretty sure this was on purpose, since I’d made a valiant struggle to move it twice, and only gotten a side eye.) Bill had checked my temperature, my tongue, and even checked… or… anyway jabbed at… my lymph nodes and abdomen checking for anything he could think of, and come up with the best theory that I had somehow become seriously anemic. He’d immediately started rummaging through the menu to find something iron rich, and I’d talked him down to Soup, just for something easy to consume, and it was theoretically on it’s way. “So run this past me again? The girl with the pink hair was here, again, because you fucking passed out on the floor trying to dial the phone.”

“That is, pretty much, what I said. I told you I didn’t dial her on purpose. Or pass out on purpose. I thought I was fine.” I retorted, jabbing at a bowl of French Onion Soup that was slowly going cold from the number of interruptions between me and consuming it. I was still tired, but what I had been able to get into me was helping. I wondered what I could have eaten or drunk that would cause me to go suddenly and sharply anemic, but I couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t sound like fiction, but that was starting to be nothing new. At best I kept drifting back to someone sufficiently into the pretend-to-be-a-vampire thing that they’d siphoned me like an renegade red cross truck and split.

“Can we stick to the part where she implied my mother might go a bit… extra… around the bend than usual?”

I wasn’t sure she would actually do it. She’d been violent in the past, but it was always a polite, tightly controlled violence. Surgeon strike punishments for bad behavior. Murder seemed a few steps outside her range, though I could imagine she might hire someone to do it in a heartbeat. That was I think what bothered me. She clearly had people working alongside her in her crazy vampire thing. It might not be outside their behavior, and that’s what I could see her taking advantage of. I guessed on the one hand it would be easy to see someone coming down the street with a wooden stake, but I didn’t remember if that was something she subscribed to. She’d been much more interested in describing why they were everything evil than how you did anything about it, at least to me. 

“Yeah I’m not really thrilled about that either.” Bill grumbled. “I know you’re getting spooked about getting the police involved but…”

“But she’s making death threats now.” Susan provided. “Joe this is serious shit.”

“That’s the problem though isn’t it? SHE didn’t make it. Her little pink haired friend, who’s last name I don’t know, who’s cell phone number might well connect to a shitty burner phone… SAID she’s making threats.” I explained, punctuating my explanation with the spoon. I was about ready to give up on the cheese and crouton, which had become sort of simultaneously soggy and impossible to break up, but the cooling soup still smelled alright. “That’s what they’re going to focus on. And if they question her, she’s going to pitch them a line about how I’m this irresponsible unpredictable mad man who destroyed her mailbox and dropped off the planet.”

“You’re a published author.”

“I write fantasy novels, some of which cover some pretty wild themes. She’s a businesswoman. Her entire life has been around cultivating the image of being respectable, kind…” I floundered for a word. “She’s always been very careful to make sure she controls how people see her, and how people see me. I know I said we could try it earlier but they are going to let her wrap them around her finger. I would lay money on it.”

I’ve explained this before. I know I have, and I know they’ve heard me, but Bill showed me earlier by letting her talk him into giving her my address, there’s a big difference between them listening to me and them hearing me. It’s the uphill struggle I guess. The reason why we still hear questions like ‘but why did you stay’, or ‘why didn’t you tell anyone’. 

Would you tell someone when all around you there’s evidence that even if you do, it might not help? Understaffed, underfunded, or just plain not taking it seriously… doesn’t matter. Dead is dead, hurt is hurt. 

“…I… I’ll take it under advisement, but please don’t do this without me ok?” I finally offered. It was the best I could think of to settle things, without actually involving the police, who I was more or less convinced would be worse than useless. 

I let them try and figure out what to say about this, and slurp cooling soup, the congealed bread and cheese bumping against my lip as I drain the broth out of the cup. 

It’s already occurred to me that it’s entirely possible that sure, I might have been poisoned, but shit, while I can match up -some- things… northing’s aligning with the teeth, or the the fact that Pinkie wasn’t wrong, and some of my symptoms sound a lot like being low on blood or iron. 

“…Joe I’m… I mean how seriously are we taking all of this? I mean should we we trying to track down that lady from the Bar? Not the one that got in here… somehow… but the other one. Is there any chance she’s also working for your mom?”

“…Gonna go with No. I think in this case my mom’s Hench-pixie was right, and if she’s involved in this, it’s because she hates my mom.”

**Author's Note:**

> I've even made some art for this trainwreck. Is that awful?
> 
> https://xaotl.deviantart.com/art/Teeth-Streetlight-705632394
> 
> There's more than this scattered around but there ya go. No one's going to read this anyway I bet.


End file.
